Silver Linings Playbook - review

It’s clear that the hero and heroine of Silver Linings Playbook are made for one another from the moment they meet. He asks her immediately how her husband died, having been warned not to raise the topic, while she quizzes him about the medication he’s on now that he has been discharged from a mental institution. It turns out they’ve both taken many of the same meds. Small world! He is Pat (Bradley Cooper), trying to put his life back together after being found guilty of a violent attack on his wife’s lover. She is Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), whose response to bereavement has been to sleep around at the office, drawing the line only at the coffee machine.

Of course, Pat and Tiffany don’t know they are right for each other. They’re in a film, whereas we are watching one and have doubtless seen many such odd-couple stories of love among the antidepressants (Benny and Joon, say, or Mike Figgis’s underrated Mr Jones). Hollywood’s attitude towards mental illness has typically been patronising or simplistic but then so has its attitude towards most disabilities. Why should the mentally ill get special privileges? Silver Linings Playbook is no exception, though it does have instances of authentic feeling distinct from its ingratiating tone.

After leaving hospital, Pat moves in with his parents, who have their own problems – his mother (Jacki Weaver) is jittery; his father (Robert De Niro) has more than his share of superstitions and OCD. Pat’s friend Ronnie (John Ortiz) is falling apart from the effort of pretending that all is dandy in his life. “People like Tiffany and me, maybe we know something,” Pat decides, and the film seems to concur. The writer-director David O Russell peddles the line that anyone declared to be suffering from a mental illness has simply got their diagnosis ahead of the rest of us.

That’s not to say Pat doesn’t have conspicuous issues. He talks a mile a minute and kids himself that he and his wife are working on their marriage, overlooking the restraining order she has against him. He expresses his dissatisfaction with A Farewell to Arms by throwing the book out of the window, which would be fine if he opened the window first. His is a photogenic condition that manifests itself in charming eccentricity – ordering cereal on a dinner date, exercising overenthusiastically while wearing a bin liner – rather than in drooling and swaying. When Pat suffers a relapse, the script piles on the mitigating circumstances. He keeps his temper in check after seeing his psychiatrist racially insulted. He holds back even when the man is assaulted. But once the miscreants start on Pat’s brother –well, that’s too much. Let us be grateful no one saw fit to add an injured orphan into the mix.

It’s disappointing to find such cautious filmmaking from Russell, who has in the past aimed for the funny bone via the cerebral cortex rather than the tear ducts or the heartstrings. His 1994 debut, Spanking the Monkey, a breezy story of mother-son incest, announced a talent for finding comic tensions in dysfunctional families.

Russell pursued this in the screwball adoption comedy Flirting With Disaster (1996) and The Fighter (2010), a boxing movie in which the most electrifying spats were verbal and domestic. So it follows that the strongest moments in Silver Linings Playbook arise when large groups of people are barking and bantering in humdrum living rooms, lit by the cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi with celebratory brightness. (He shoots the whole film in a kind of beige dazzle.)

Cooper, known primarily for the vulgar Hangover films, nails Pat’s mania but not the mournful side of the character. Lawrence, who at 22 has given enough outstanding performances (Winter’s Bone, The Hunger Games) to seem like a veteran already, is nicely abrasive.

The biggest surprise comes from De Niro, whose previous comedy work has drawn from a shallow well: however amusing he was in Midnight Run or Analyse This, he was being grumpy-funny, De Niro-funny. Playing Pat Sr, he locates in himself a lightness that has no overlap with his past roles. In proving that it is possible to cast off cumbersome baggage, he expresses in his gentle performance the same message that the film takes two hours and much superfluous huffing and puffing to convey.

Ryan Gilbey is the New Statesman's film critic. He is also the author of It Don't Worry Me (Faber), about 1970s US cinema, and a study of Groundhog Day in the "Modern Classics" series (BFI Publishing). He was named reviewer of the year in the 2007 Press Gazette awards.

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.